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A recent story that was covered heavily by the conservative media but not covered by the regular media at all was the leaked transcripts from a New York Times employee town hall in which the executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, laid out how the Times set the narrative for news coverage in the country by orienting their news room to go full Russian Collusion. It was great fun for a while…

“We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

Winning two Pulitzers for fake news is nothing I would brag about, but then, I don’t work at the Times.

“But then came the Mueller report, with special counsel Robert Mueller failing to establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election. “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?””

So when your narrative collapses, what to do?

Now, Baquet continued, “I think that we’ve got to change.” The Times must “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”

The headline controversy, it appears, was a preview of a new 2019-2020 New York Times. If Baquet follows through, the paper will spend the next two years, which just happens to be the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. (Baquet added, almost as an afterthought, that the Times will “continu[e] to cover his policies.”)

That the Times is, rather than reporting news, setting up narratives, is no surprise to most people on the right. I didn’t bother to write anything about it because, hey, it’s business as usual. What isn’t business as usual is that this time the Never Trumpers are helping out. Last week there were two Never Trump articles published that were pushed by MSNBC.

“Conservatives ought to make it a priority to fight for the fundamental dignity and equality of racial minorities who have been denied that dignity and equality. It will require overcoming decades of injustice, and so won’t happen quickly. We won’t disabuse the Left of their self-satisfied smears and conceits, but that’s not the point. Conservatives will be able to take solace in the fact that we’re fighting the good fight and pissing off the racists.”

Although “pissing off racists” is all well and good, even Carney admits, “we won’t disabuse the Left of their self-satisfied smears and conceits.” So you can fight the good fight, join with the left to call conservatives racist, and then…what? Get called racist yourself for your troubles?

Of course it’s not often that MSNBC devotes a segment to a Washington Examiner article, but Morning Joe did just that. If you have the time, you should watch it.

And once again, Morning Joe dedicated a whole segment to David French’s hysteria against a segment of the population that is an internet only phenomenon, and is so tiny it doesn’t show up in polling. Again, I recommend a watch, if only to catch French’s hysteria.

Not only are Carney and French helping The New York Times waste another two years of coverage on their 1619 Project rather than actually reporting news, it’s all going to turned against Republicans, which of course is Carney and French’s goal too. Any party that would reject Evan McMullin as a serious candidate must be burned to the ground, and what better way to do it in 21st Century America than with the torch of racism?

On Thursday, The Times released a statement saying that it knew about the tweets before hiring Ms. Jeong, 30, and that she would stay on the editorial board.

“Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment,” The Times said in its statement. “For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media.”

So virulent racism is OK as long as it’s used as a counter attack against trolls? It’s a brand new argument which isn’t even remotely intellectually defensible, but it’s one I’ve seen copied across forums and message boards throughout the week. Of course at this point I fully expected a defense of her hiring, I was just curious as to what form it would take. It’s almost disappointing that they put such little effort in mounting a defense. What makes Jeong’s tweets perfectly acceptable compared to say, Roseanne Barr’s comes down to, “it’s just different OK?”

Just a couple of observations…

In a political sense, this is good news for the GOP. The Democrats have really been driven off the rails this year with the party being pushed into indefensible positions on abolishing ICE and embracing socialism (whatever that means, and I suppose that most have no clue). This is all in a year when the Democrats should have expected some Congressional gains. Instead, it’s turning into the “I don’t believe in borders, #CancelWhitePeople” party. If Trump and the GOP have any wit about them, they’ll capitalize on this. Every Democratic Congressional candidate should be asked about Jeong’s tweets, whether they are acceptable, is the New York Times supporting #CancelWhitePeople? “Candidate A, do you believe that white men are bullshit?” They need to be made to own their crazy.

Also in a political sense, but in a more long run view, how does being the anti-white party influence Democratic Party prospects? During the 2016 election, I observed that some of these guys really were serious about having a case of the ass for white people. Key to the Democrat’s “Demography is Destiny” voter replacement plan is that at least for the short run (the next two decades) white voters will continue to vote for the Democrats at about the same percentages. But how much comparison to white people as “groveling goblins” can Democrat white voters handle? I’ve no doubt that a certain type of NPR listening, sweater wearing, herbal tea drinking white person, reading Jeong’s tweets, could chuckle and say, “Yes we are the worst!” Nor would this be anything but catnip to your typical white college radical; but what about families? Does the typical white Democratic voter with children really want to support a party that targets their children and see them as a problem? I’m not so sure.

And that brings me to my final observation, that the lack of even a pretense of intellectual evenhandedness in the defense of Jeong shows that the left has gone full tribalism. They are defending Jeong, not because she’s misunderstood, or there is merit to her tweets, but simply because they are in the same tribe and are defending one of their own. We live in an age when intellectual and political arguments are passé. The only thing that matters is which side you are one.

So how will this play out in the midterm elections? I’ve already made my predictions, but hopefully at least through October Trump should be reminding voters what the “failing New York Times” thinks of them.

I had written last month that I had thought Jeb Bush was a little bit cray cray because of his need to remake himself as someone he isn’t: a Hispanic. So completely has he tried to strip away the culture he was born in, as scion of a northeastern WASP family, that his do over as El Jeb the Immigrant looks odd and uncomfortable. Now comes word that it’s passed into full scale delusion. The New York Times reports that:

Mr. Bushy, a former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate, was born in Texas and hails from one of America’s most prominent political dynasties. But on at least one occasion, it appears he got carried away with his appeal to Spanish-speaking voters and claimed he actually was Hispanic.

In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled “race/ethnicity.”

Carried away is putting it mildly.

Bush of course quickly sent out a tweet apologizing for his “mistake.” But I’m not buying that. This is the same guy who claimed he was Florida’s first “Latino Governor.” Even if Bush was a Latino, that position was already taken by Bob Martinez. Such monomaniacal focus on remaking himself, at this stage in his life, is a red flag to me of a host of mental issues.

Rush Limbaugh was in full on denial mode today, bragging that yesterday’s election result meant that the American people soundly rejected liberalism. Nu-uh. All it means is that civic minded Republican voters are more likely to turn out to vote during mid-term elections than young people who only know about the President and not much else…And that will be obvious in 2016 when Republicans, who will have more Senate seats to defend than Democrats, lose the Senate gains they’ve just won.

Just to elaborate on that point a bit, if I were to guess right now, I would guess the electorate would swing right back into the Democratic camp in 2016. There is a big difference between the number of people who show up to vote in the mid-terms and those who show up in Presidential years. Based on the numbers I’ve seen this morning, turn out for this year was even lower than in 2010, which was another big Republican year. So you have a 76 million voter turnout for this year, but in 2012 you had 129 million voters.

That’s about a 50 million voter difference between the midterms and the Presidential voting years. So I suspect GOP gains will be washed away in 2016; particularly since there will be more Republican Senate seats to defend then Democratic ones that year. So all of the Republican high fiving will turn to bitter salty tears two years from now, while the current Democratic rage will turn to Democratic gloating.

And demography continues its relentless march,

But I did stumble across a mind blowing revelation, and hat tip to the Parapundit blog for bringing this to my attention, but according to the New York Times, Democrats have not won the white woman vote since 1992.

Where the white women at?

Apparently trending to the GOP. And I am surprised that I didn’t know that before now. For decades I’ve been hearing about the GOP’s gender gap, and I knew it was a phony issue. I mean overall, if your numbers are down for the woman’s vote, the inverse of that is that the numbers are up for the male vote. However the media doesn’t frame the question that way. Why can’t Democrats attract Male votes? Nobody cares about that although the issue is just as real for the Democrats as any alleged female gender gap for the Republicans, However there is a resistance in the media to accepting that simple truth, no matter how obvious it is. Certainly that was the case in reference to the Texas Governor’s race in which a Salon writer regards math showing that Davis didn’t win the female vote as racist. White women stayed away from her.

And whites in general are slowly but surely abandoning the Democrats. An AP article made this point in an exit poll study:

Across 21 states where Senate races were exit polled, whites broke for the Republican by a significant margin in all but four…

The shift is particularly acute in the South, where some of the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives lost their seats on Tuesday.

In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan carried just 33 percent of the white vote

In Louisiana, Mary Landrieu captured just 18 percent of the white vote

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin captured 43 percent of the white vote in his successful bid for re-election, that’s down 18 points from his support among whites in 2008.

After the 2012 election I wrote a post about this very issue, the gradual re-arranging of the political parties along ethnic and racial lines. Of course I thought then that Democrats still had white women, I didn’t realize that as a group, they had left the Democrats a quarter of a century ago.

How you feel about this I suppose depends on your point of view. If you are a Democratic strategist, even though turn out failed for the Democrats this year, the long term demographic trends are heartening. As whites move into a smaller percentage of the electorate, the coalition of everyone else will eventually establish more or less permanent political power. Although that won’t happen quickly, since whites will still be the single largest group. They are not exactly fading into that good night just yet.

For me, even though the election was disheartening in a lot of ways, I think presages the end of a modern political democracy and voting based on issues into the realignment of parties drawn along ethnic, racial, and religious lines. In other words, we’ll become like every other 3rd world crap hole country in which issues are irrelevant, only your tribe matters. To me, that’s a sad end for the American experiment.

Let me offer a hat tip to the Lion of the Blogosphere for alerting me to a year and a half old column written by the New York Time’s house conservative, David Brooks. Calling Brooks a conservative is a bit of a stretch. As a Columnist for the New York Times and regular contributor to PBS’s News Hour, referring to Brooks as a conservative is akin to describing the Commander in Chief Barrack Obama as a soldier. It’s probably more apt to describe his politics as me-too Republicanism. That basically describes the Republican Party from the FDR era up until the age of Reagan. They were for whatever the Democrats were for, only not as much. Democrats would propose a program, the Republicans would say, “OK, but that program is too big. We need to trim it down.” The Democrats would say OK and they would work out a number, not as big as first proposed, but still big, and there you go, bipartisan compromise.

English: David Brooks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Me-too Republicanism.

As a commentator, Brooks seems to bring nothing to the table. I’ve watched him many times over the years expound on the conventional wisdom of the day on The News Hour. His opinions were banal and shared by everyone in his class. He could have written the ‘Conventional Wisdom Watch’ column for Newsweek. And of course, he was in love with Obama, famously deciding that Obama would make a great President after staring (too long I think) at the crease in Obama’s pants.

So it’s no surprise that Brooks is a supporter of amnesty and open borders immigration. After all, everyone in his class is. That’s the dominate view of the cocktail party set. Brook’s column is loaded with a pablum of open borders clichés, and inaccuracies that have been debunked multiple times, but what got my attention was this comment:

“Thanks to the labor of low-skill immigrants, the cost of food, homes and child care comes down, living standards rise and more women can afford to work outside the home.”

That remark leapt out at me, so revealing as it was of the class that Brooks is a part of; wealthy, urban, liberal, and totally disconnected and unattached to the rest of the country. Yes, food is cheaper. But it’s cheaper because we are allowing growers to ignore actual agricultural visas and employ illegals far cheaper than they would have to pay foreign, but legal workers. Child care, however, isn’t cheaper. For the struggling middle class shopping for day care is as expensive as it’s ever been. But Brooks doesn’t mean day care, he means nannies. For that class, that’s what child care means.

Brooks is justifying a permanent underclass to keep him and his buddies in the cocktail party circuit awash in cheap nannies and arugula. His cheap food and labor argument could have been used, and probably was used, by some southern senator in the 1850’s justifying slavery. “Ahh say suh…(yes I’m imagining him as Foghorn Leghorn) the institution of slavery is needed to provide cheap and plentiful food and clothing for all, as well as mammies to raise ouah babies so we can pursue self actualizing careers…” OK that last bit is more Brooks than Foghorn Leghorn, but you get the idea,

Putting it another way, Brooks could be saying, “Thanks to the labor of our slaves, the cost of food, homes and child care comes down…”Slaves, serfs, proles, no matter what you call them, a life dependent on keeping a permanent underclass so that you can live your dreams because you are crushing theirs is fundamentally un-American. And unstable. The elites want a life of plentiful servants, just like they see on Downton Abbey, and to do that they are willing to crush wage rates among the native poor, working class, and middle class.

You can’t be an Eloi without the Morlocks, but eventually the Molocks will turn on you.

The political blogosphere was both atwitter and Twitter over the firing of John Derbyshire from National Review this weekend. Not for nothing though. Derbyshire posted a column last Thursday on the Taki’s Magazine website called, “The Talk: Nonblack version.” Due to the Trayvon Martin shooting hysteria, much has been made of The Talk in the national media. The Talk, as defined by the New York Times (where I go to find out what being black in America is like) is, “the one that has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with what it means to be a black teenager in a country with a history of regarding young black men as a threat. The talk about standing up straight, dressing the part, keeping your hands in sight at all times and never, ever letting your anger get the best of you.”

That’s not bad advice for anyone, particularly when dealing with law enforcement, but that sort of talking to is totally unlike Derbyshire’s version; which consists of “guidance” to his children. A sample of such advice consists of:

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

If you want to read the whole thing, you can go to the website, but I think you get the idea, but the one that particularly bothered me was this:

Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black.

By the most standard definitions of racism, that’s racist.

On the face of it, Derbyshire was probably conflating IQ with intelligence, a mistake that is its own whole area of social commentary. Although the IQ/Intelligence topic is worth reviewing, it’s not necessary to read Derbyshire’s mean spiritedness in this piece. This wasn’t meant as a joke or parody, Derbyshire was being serious. In probably the only bit of actual reporting ever done by the website Think Progress, they actually contacted Derbyshire to check if he meant it as some kind of parody. Rather than taking the opportunity to back off of his harsh column, he double downed on it, “I’d call it social commentary.” More to the point, Derbyshire wasn’t hiding from the accusation of being a racist, he admitted it.

Given that, I would say National Review had no choice. NR editor Rich Lowery posted a comment disavowing Derbyshire’s piece Friday night and by Saturday posted another comment letting him go from the magazine staff. Lowery gave a pretty clear eyed reason:

“His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that itis by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways.”

This wasn’t about political correctness, but about letting one writer’s racism contaminate the reputation of the National Review, and by extension, the conservative movement. I think National Review did the right thing in letting Derbyshire go. One of the ways that William F. Buckley, founder of the magazine and probably the godfather of modern American conservatism, helped make conservatism a legitimate force in American politics again was by pushing out the conspiracy nuts and other cranks that contributed nothing to the movement but bad press.

Without Buckley and his cleaning up of conservatism, there would have been no Reagan, and Obama’s current (public) views would now be considered center right.

The left had a field day with Derbyshire’s appearance at CPAC. How much more of that crap does the right need to allow? It’s not as though the right controls the message, the left does since they control the media. That’s why the left not only doesn’t need, but just doesn’t’ police their own. They are immune from the kookiness of their fringe nuts. It’s why the media will drumbeat their coverage of Republican birthers, even though birtherism originated with the pro-Hillary Democrats. Meanwhile, during the Bush administration more than half of Democrats believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, but since they also control the media, it never taints them.

Unfair or not, it’s the way it is so it falls on the right to be diligent in making sure that we police our racists and conspiracy theorists. So Derbyshire can continue to write what he wants, where he wants, but just not under the banner of the National Review.